Significant advances in wireless radio and satellite telecommunications systems technology have allowed such systems to become both indispensable and commonplace in the everyday activities of people and businesses. These communications systems generally include a transmitter component for sending signals wirelessly to a receiver component. The receiver component is usually connected to an antenna for collecting and feeding signals to the receiver. The design of the antenna is critical to the performance of the entire system, and improvements in antenna technology have contributed to the increased range and reliability typical of modern receivers.
Placement and orientation of the antenna relative to the transmitter component can also be critical to the performance of a receiver. For example, in modern digital satellite communication systems, such as Direct Broadcast Satellite ("DBS") systems, a ground-based transmitter beams an uplink signal to a satellite positioned in a geosynchronous orbit. The satellite in turn relays the signal back to ground-based receivers. The DBS systems allow each household subscribing to the system to receive digital television, audio, data, and video directly from the satellite using a relatively small, directional receiver antenna. The typical DBS satellite receiver antenna is configured as an 18-inch diameter parabolic dish which focuses the signals to a feed/low noise block ("LNB") mounted to the dish. An indoor television set-top decoder module or "IRD" is linked to the antenna via a cable.
Subscribers can currently install direct-to-home satellite receiver antennas without professional assistance or equipment. The relatively small, lightweight receiver dish antenna is mounted outside the home in a direct line of sight with the broadcast satellite, typically southward. Because DBS signals are beamed from a "stationary" geosynchronous satellite, the dish should not need adjustment once it is fixed in place. However, in order to ensure the quality of the signals received by the system, and thus take full advantage of the DBS system's capabilities, it is critical for the antenna to be pointed accurately toward the satellite, or "peaked", to maximize the strength of the received signals.
To peak the antenna in a DBS system, the subscriber or installer points the antenna in the general direction of the satellite, then fine-tunes the alignment by using a signal strength meter displayed on the television screen by the satellite receiver IRD. The subscriber then adjusts the antenna position until the on-screen meter indicates that signal strength and quality has been maximized. To prevent multiple trips between the location of the antenna to inside the home to view the meter, satellite antennas may include a simple alignment indicator mounted to the antenna. The indicator is typically a light-emitting diode ("LED") which operates from feedback signals fed to the antenna by the IRD through the link cable. The LED flashes to alert the installer that the antenna is pointed correctly.
During peaking of the antenna, the LED signal strength indicator typically alerts the installer that signal strength is increasing by flashing at a faster rate. However, the human eye is often not able to discern minuscule changes in flash rate which can correspond to subtle movement of the antenna during alignment. As a result, the antenna peaking procedure for the antenna to maximize the received signal strength may suffer due to inaccurate perception of the indicator.